Gov. Chris Christie can brag he applied the brakes to government spending in New Jersey. But will hard-nosed conservative graders in key early GOP presidential primary states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina be impressed?

Although Christie applied the brakes to spending, spending’s still zipping along at a clip approaching $6 million a minute around the clock, 365 days a year. New Jersey’s income, sales and local property taxes put the state in the top tier of high-taxing states. And its regulatory bureaucracy puts the state in the bottom tier of most state rankings according to pro-business climate. Also, the state’s unemployment rate hovers above rates for both the nation and the Northeast.

And although Christie refused to renew an income tax hike on high incomes imposed by . Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine, New Jersey continues to be a soak-the-rich state. It collects nearly 37 percent of total state income tax revenue from the 1.3 percent of filers with taxable incomes over $500,000.

Buffing up his conservative credentials, Christie is proposing a 10 percent income tax cut. But he faces long odds in persuading the legislature — still solidly Democratic after his own no-coattails re-election — to go along. Complicating this initiative, state tax collections right now are running below budget projections.

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Christie took office in mid-fiscal year, January 2010, with FY 2009-10 spending set by Corzine at $50.129 billion in state and federal tax dollars, up from the previous year’s $49.3 billion.

In his own first budget, for FY 2010-11, Christie slowed spending by $1.82 billion, to $48.3 billion, according to the state’s annual comprehensive financial statement for the period. But Christie’s second budget stepped on the spending accelerator, boosting spending by $2 billion, back up to $50.3 billion.

Are such numbers likely to excite Republicans in comparatively low-spending, low-taxing Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina?

Christie’s better bet for quickening GOP heartbeats in those places may be to focus his bragging on one component of spending — the cost of maintaining the state’s government bureaucracy.

These numbers — the costs of salaries, benefits, office space, materials, etc. — can be found in an obscure niche of the state’s fiscal accounts, under “Government Direction, Management and Control.” From FY 2009-10 through FY 2011-12, Christie squeezed such spending down to $6.62 billion, $152 million less than it was — a reduction in inflation-adjusted terms of near $500 million.

There’s a footnote, however. The trend in this direction actually started under his liberal predecessor, Corzine. From FY 2006-09, Corzine held bureaucratic cost increases to a fraction of 1 percent — actually a cut of his own in inflation-adjusted terms.

As he goes bragging around the corn fields and pig pens of Iowa, Christie may want to skip over this footnote.